Lucy was a real swinger

To support their contention that ape-like ancestors became human
because they learned to walk upright, evolutionists would like to
bring Lucy down from the trees. But paleoanthropologists David
Green and Zeresenay Alemseged have determined Lucy's cousins
retained their anatomical equipment for swinging through the forest
and therefore likely did just that.

"The question as to whether Australopithecus
afarensis was strictly bipedal or if they also climbed
trees has been intensely debated for more than 30 years," Green
explains. "These remarkable fossils provide strong evidence that
these individuals were still climbing at this stage in human
evolution."

Australopithecus afarensis, of which the most
well-known specimen is "Lucy," is an extinct ape widely accepted
among evolutionists as a human ancestor that was acquiring features
useful to a proto-human.

Some evolutionists, zealous to depict Lucy as bipedal, get
offended at the Creation Museum's anatomically correct
reconstruction depicting her as a knuckle-walker and even ignore
the evidence presented by other evolutionists that her wrists were
well suited to supporting her weight. If Lucy and her cousins
could be shown to have abandoned the trees, so much the better. Of
course, evolutionary thinking always has a way to adapt to any
data. So, since the latest data leaves the afarensis
family flying through the air with the greatest of ease, that's
okay too.

"Because shoulder blades are paper-thin, they rarely fossilize,
and when they do, they are almost always fragmentary," Alemseged
says. "So finding both shoulder blades completely intact and
attached to a skeleton of a known and pivotal species was like
hitting the jackpot." By examining them, the researchers have
determined that Selam, just like modern apes, was well-equipped for
climbing.

The shoulder has a ball-and-socket joint that provides excellent
range of motion. Thanks to this joint, both humans and apes can
raise their arms above their heads. In humans, the socket (glenoid
fossa) is pointed to the side. But in apes, the socket is oriented
more upwards, a helpful arrangement for animals that regularly
dangle their body weight from their shoulders.

"The scapulae of the African apes, and to a lesser
extent, Pongo [orangutans], differ from those
of Homo [humans] in possessing more cranially
oriented glenoid fossae, which may be an adaptation to more
effectively distribute strain over the joint capsule during
climbing and reaching when the upper limb is loaded." Also, on
the back of the scapula, the spine, a bony ridge to which muscles
like the trapezius attach, is closer to the horizontal in humans,
but "Suspensory great apes also possess obliquely oriented scapular
spines."

Green and Alemseged compared Selam's shoulder blades to those of
juvenile and adult australopithecines (afarensis
and africanus), gorillas, chimpanzees,
orangutans, Homo erectus, Homo
floresiensis, and modern humans. Both sorts of extinct
humans (H. erectus and H. floresiensis)
had laterally facing sockets and the more or less horizontal
scapular spines typical of modern humans. Selam's shoulder
blades, however, were in all ways ape-like and most closely matched
the gorilla.

"The apelike appearance of the most complete A.
afarensis scapulae [i.e. Selam's] strengthens the
hypothesis that these hominins participated in a behavioral
strategy that incorporated a considerable amount of arboreal
behaviors in addition to bipedal locomotion," they conclude."This
new find confirms the pivotal place that Lucy and Selam's species
occupies in human evolution," Alemseged says. "While bipedal like
humans, A. afarensis was still a capable climber. Though
not fully human, A. afarensis was clearly on its way."

What is clear, actually, is that the evolutionists have found
additional anatomical evidence that Australopithecus
afarensis was just an ape. Nothing about the results screams
"human" or "human-in-the-making" but only "ape." Scooting
australopithecines along the evolutionary path to "human-hood" is a
job for the evolutionary imagination. But if Lucy and Selam were
not extinct, they'd just be another exhibit in the ape section of
the zoo. God created apes and humans on the same day about 6,000
years ago. Humans did not evolve from ape-like predecessors.

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